Living sculpture: In a world with dying coral reefs, an artist/metallurgist sets out to create new ones

View full size Artist Colleen Flanigan creates small coral reefs by using an electric rod to accumulate dissolved minerals in seawater at SeaHorse Aquarium Supply, where her reefs are providing shelter for fish. "Instead of using life to grow metal, now I can use metal to grow life," Flanigan said. Ray Whitehouse/The Oregonian

As an artist, Colleen Flanigan wields scientific processes the way others might use a paintbrush.

The 40-year-old visual environmental artist and metallurgist can grow plated copper with an electrical current and manipulate chemistry to tarnish patinas on metal forms. So in 2003, when Flanigan learned of a technology that could fuse science and art to build coral reefs on top of her metal sculptures, she felt she'd found her calling.

"It was one of those 'aha' moments, like 'this is it.' Like when people fall in love," Flanigan says. "I realized this is my niche. I can actually use my skills, like collaborating, but now I can collaborate with nature. I could help coral reefs by doing what I do."

Flanigan had stumbled upon Biorock, a trademarked technology developed in the 1970s that runs a low-voltage electric current through metal in saltwater, causing the accumulation of calcium carbonate (limestone), facilitating the growth of coral reefs.So Flanigan embarked on a bold venture. She attended a conference in Bali, Indonesia, learned to scuba dive and raised $36,000 via private donations and the fundraising website Kickstarter. In June she assembled a team and built a sculpture in Cancún, Mexico. It's a sinuous design, 15 feet long and 6 feet tall and inspired by the DNA double helix, all beautifully curved steel shaped by skilled human hands at the Cancún factory Todo Inoxidable.

The plan is for the sculpture to be lowered via crane into the shallow waters of MUSA, an underwater museum best known for its 400 life-size submerged sculptures by British sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor. The project bogged down in a pile of Mexican paperwork but now has the green light as soon as Flanigan can raise more money and reassemble her team.

Someday (as early as this winter, Flanigan hopes) the sculpture will be sunk and plugged into a 2-volt direct current power source and seeded with native coral species.

Then it will bloom.

It's a gargantuan effort to create a living sculpture of a coral reef. But the project isn't solely artistic: Flanigan describes it as coral reef life support.

"If you ask me directly, 'Is this about making a beautiful piece of art?,' the answer would be 'no.'" Flanigan says. "It has to have more functionality. I want it to be taken over by life."

Global decline of corals Building electrified coral reefs might seem the stuff of science fiction, but this technological approach is in response to a stark reality: Corals are dying.

Oregon State University coral biologist Virginia Weis notes recent research suggests the planet could lose 20 to 30 percent of its coral reefs in the next 30 years as oceans become warmer and more acidic.

The rock record shows reef-building corals have been around for about 230 million years, and they've adapted to weather some drastic changes, but not in such a short period of time.

"Corals have certainly managed lots of perturbations through evolutionary time and they have survived. But it's the pace of change that's the problem," Weis says. "You don't evolve on the order of decades, you evolve on the order of tens of thousands to millions of years. That's what the whole planet is up against." Building an electric sanctuary Corals need a low-acid environment to build their calcium carbonate shells, so as released carbon dioxide acidifies oceans, coral shells become smaller and brittle. And since the shells of dead corals form the base that new corals build upon, the results of acidic water are clear: no coral reefs.

Enter Biorock, a specific implementation of the much older technology of cathodic protection, developed in the 1800s to shield marine vessels from corrosion by creating an electric current in their hulls. Rust falls away from the metal, but serendipitously people noted that sea life began to thrive on the metal surfaces.

The electric current actually lowers the acidity of the water, creating a localized environment where corals can thrive.

"We can grow oysters and corals in acidic waters, because we're creating locally alkaline -- which is the reverse of acidic -- conditions," says Thomas Goreau, president of the nonprofit Global Coral Reef Alliance and a pioneer of the use of Biorock. "We can't undo the acidification of the ocean, but we can create marine sanctuaries for the animals."

Linking art and science Flanigan, who grew up near Monterey, Calif., has always cherished the ocean, and much of her art brings to mind seascapes and shapes. Her jewelry and sculptures are often built on curves and spirals or branching forms, mimicking the designs preferred by sea creatures.

Meanwhile Flanigan adopts alter egos, like "Miss Snail Pail," who crusades against the use of toxic pesticides. Flanigan gave about half of an OMSI Science Pub presentation about Biorock while posing as blue-haired Amphitrite, the mythological wife of Poseidon.

Over time these roles, and much of Flanigan's work, have become part performance art, part environmental activism. "I'm not a cause- or humanitarian-activist who's just going to talk about the thing," Flanigan says.

So now, as Flanigan awaits the chance to return to Mexico, she spends much of her time in the bubbling confines of SeaHorse Aquarium Supply in Northeast Portland. The shop, bathed in blue fluorescent light and surrounded by tanks of prismatic corals and fish, has clear appeal for an artist, but Flanigan comes for a more scientific purpose.

Tucked away in one corner, Flanigan and SeaHorse owner Gary "Woody" Wood, a former research chemist, track an ongoing Biorock experiment. A pair of hydnophora corals branch off a piece of rebar suspended in the water, hooked to a titanium electrode applying a 2-volt current. A thin layer of calcium carbonate coats the rebar.

"The electrolysis is improving the water quality significantly," Wood says.

It's a fledgling experiment, but one Flanigan is using to learn about coral biology in anticipation of returning to Mexico to finish the final stage of her project -- the actual seeding of corals onto her sculpture, making it a vibrant, living reef. "I want to plant it," she says. "To me it won't be done if it's just sort of hanging out." A problem of scale Compared with the 1,600 miles of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, Flanigan's sculpture would be a speck on the seafloor. For that matter, even the couple hundred Biorock structures in 20 countries are a pittance compared with the vast scale of the planet's coral reefs and the rapidly changing environmental factors that threaten them.

And scale is the main knock on things like Biorock -- the idea of building entire coastlines of plugged-in reefs just seems preposterous. So can cathodic protection help?

"If you're talking about The Great Barrier Reef in Australia, no," Weis says. "If you're talking regionally, like if a Caribbean island might want to have a reef where tourists can go and they can restore a fishery, I think that's great and we've got to start thinking in those terms."

But this is where the frank appraisals of the scientist meet the brave dreams of the artist.

"If somebody can build a superhighway, you absolutely can build a super reef," Flanigan says. "It's just, who wants to try it?"